


history forgot about us

by kathillards



Series: ad infinitum [5]
Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Genre: Alternate Timeline, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 07:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8657866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: There’s something wrong about the pterodactyl being caged in a zoo. There’s something off about its song. —- Kira, in another world.





	

**Author's Note:**

> major spoilers for the dino charge finale 'end of extinction' in these notes, don't read further if you don't want to be spoiled.
> 
> as we know, the dino charge finale left us with a timeline where, realistically, the dino _thunder_ team could not exist, and neither could a lot of other teams. for the purposes of this fic, mmpr-space have been erased from existence by the new timeline the dino charge rangers created. by 2004 of this fic's universe, we have five ranger teams on earth:
> 
> \- og samurai team (jayden's dad)  
> \- lightspeed rescue  
> \- time force  
> \- wild force  
> \- ninja storm
> 
> lost galaxy and alien might still exist, but not on earth. anyway i wanted to explore the implications of a world with dinosaurs, divergent timelines, and how the morphin' grid might work in such a scenario with the dino thunder rangers, who would probably be the most affected by the dino charge rangers' messing with human history the way they did.
> 
> i figure, the originals would still be friends even if they weren't rangers, because they were friends before. but the dino thunder kids? maybe there's a universe out there where they were never friends.
> 
> (but it's not this one.)

**history forgot about us**

Kira wakes up with an itch under her skin.

This isn’t unusual; ever since she started her senior year of high school, she’s been feeling it, something lingering just beneath her eyelids, simmering below her bones, wanting to escape but having no outlet. She can’t explain it, hasn’t told anyone, just lives with the feeling crawling through her body.

Sometimes, it goes away. Rare moments, like when she strums her guitar and plays a song, or sits down in science class next to a boy she doesn’t know. When she walks past a café without looking in, even when something inside her tugs at her to stop – but why would she?

She doesn’t know what _Hayley’s Cyberspace_ is.

-:-

The first time in two months that the itch truly goes away, she’s out on a field trip to the Reefside Zoo, bored out of her mind and scribbling new song lyrics as her history teacher drones on and on about the dinosaurs.

Kira’s never been particularly interested in the subject matter, preferring human faces to giant lizards, so she almost doesn’t look up when a cry rings through the air and the students around her gasp out loud, turning as one to see what’s happening.

It’s a pterodactyl – a _pteranodon_ , she hears Dr. Oliver correct in her mind – soaring through the skies. The sight itself is beautiful, the lone dinosaur silhouetted against the gray clouds, mouth open as it sings a song of a faraway land, a memory imprinted on the species from the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth freely.

Her heart sings. She’s never felt anything like this, the way her pulse pounds the same rhythm as the pterodactyl, the way her gaze tracks its arc through the sky, unable to look away, the sudden rush of adrenaline filling up her body. Looking around quickly, she doesn’t think any of the others have had the same reaction.

She can’t imagine why she would feel so connected to a little dinosaur at the zoo, though. Her hands are shaking when she finally looks away. The boy next to her sends her a concerned look.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asks. She remembers his name is _Ethan_ , and they were lab partners at some point.

“Yeah, whatever,” she mumbles, brushing past him. She can’t resist one last look at the sky, as the pterodactyl finishes its flight and dives back down into its habitat. She clenches her pencil so tight in her hand, she almost breaks it.

There’s something wrong about the pterodactyl being caged in a zoo. There’s something off about its song.

-:-

Her bandmates drag her to a soccer game once, just once, before she decides she hates soccer and she doesn’t care if it’s the biggest sport at her school, she never wants to see another soccer ball in her life.

But after the game, she runs into Reefside’s star player, Conner McKnight – she knows his name only because he’s tall, obnoxious, and nobody will shut up about him, even though she doesn’t think he’s _that_ good – at the house party they’re at to celebrate the win.

“Hey, wanna dance?” he asks loudly over the music. Kira pretends not to hear and takes another shot. He asks again, even louder this time, “WANNA DANCE?”

“No.”

His face twists in a pout. “Why not?” he asks, clearly tipsy already.

Kira finally looks up at him, an annoyed sigh on her lips. “I don’t like you.”

“I’ve never even seen you before, how can you not like me?” he demands, offended.

“I don’t need to know you to dislike you.”

Conner frowns. “Well, that’s not fair. Why do I feel like I know you?”

“You don’t,” she says quickly, because god help her if Conner McKnight recognizes her as _that girl from that punk band_ or whatever. “Why would you?”

“I don’t know,” he mutters, voice going suddenly soft as he stares down at her. “Why would I?”

That feeling crawls into the pit of her stomach again. There’s no reason for Conner McKnight to know Kira Ford, not in any version of reality. And yet, here they stand, in between the blaring music and the golden lights, anyway.

-:-

“Do you believe in alternate lives?” Ethan asks her one day, out of the blue, breaking the silence of the study room they’re using in the library to work on their history project together.

“What?” Kira blinks at him. “No. _What_?”

Ethan shrugs, sliding his book over to her. “I dunno, I was just reading something. The multiverse theory, and how it affects people throughout different timelines. Like, some things are always constant, and some things are in flux.”

“Why are you reading this? It has nothing to do with history,” Kira sighs, but her eyes skim the words on the page anyway. Most of it is in too-advanced scientific speak for her, but one paragraph sticks out:

_Sometimes, certain people will remember flashes of a different life, one they couldn’t possibly have lived. They will experience the sensation of missing out on something, something big that happened to them in an alternate reality. The timeline will try to shift them closer, even if that is impossible. In theory, this only happens to people especially effected by a different timeline, particularly those with a strong connection to the Morphin’ Grid._

“This is stupid,” she says, but she doesn’t look up from the book. “There’s no proof that other timelines are real.”

Ethan stares at her oddly. “You really believe that?”

“Of course.” Kira pushes the book back towards him. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know…” He looks doubtful. “I just get that weird feeling sometimes, you know? Especially around you.”

He tosses that last part out casually, but it gives her pause. “What do you mean, especially around me?”

Ethan makes a face. “I don’t know how to explain it. Just that… it’s different, around you. And not just you. Sometimes, I’ll just be sitting in Hayley’s café and I’ll feel like… I’m missing something.”

“Maybe you’re just forgetting something important,” she suggests.

He looks at her. “Maybe.”

Thankfully, he drops the subject, but it doesn’t leave her mind for weeks.

-:-

She has to go to the Cyberspace café to meet up with some friends – not Ethan, though she doesn’t know why the thought crosses her mind – for a gig, and she almost runs into a waiter. This would be ordinary, except that it isn’t.

“Sorry!” he apologizes first, and she loses all train of thought when he grabs her arms to steady her. “Sorry, are you okay?”

“I…” Kira shakes her head to clear it. “Yes, yes, I – ” God, where had her words gone? “I’m fine, don’t worry about it. Sorry, you dropped your stuff…”

“Oh, no worries, it was just apple juice,” he says with a warm smile, bending to pick up the spilled drink. She likes apple juice, but that doesn’t explain why the sight of it in his hands feels so – familiar.

“And this,” Kira says, leaning to pick up what looks like a sketchbook that had fallen out of his pocket. “Is this yours?”

“Yeah, that’s mine,” he says, stopping when she pulls up with the sketchbook still open in her hands. “It’s – I just draw, sometimes…”

She knows why his words trailed off; it’s the same reason she can’t breathe anymore. The sketchbook had fallen open on a drawing of – of her. Her, in costume, as a superhero, wing flaring behind her. All yellow. Guitar in hands.

“Okay, I know that looks…weirdly like you…” he says slowly, looking just as confused as she feels. “But I swear – I’ve never seen you before in my life, I actually just moved to this city, and I… you probably think I’m a creep or – ”

“No,” Kira says quickly. “I believe you.”

And she does. It makes no sense how a boy she’s never met before can draw her so perfectly, but it’s true. She’s never seen him in her life, but somehow – somehow, she knows him.

-:-

The feeling only gets worse and worse until she finally corners Ethan in the café again, carefully avoiding the waiter – Trent, his name is Trent, she’s learned – and slamming her hands on his table.

“Whoa, someone’s in a bad mood.”

“I’m not in a bad mood,” she says through gritted teeth. “I – I just – I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“PMS?” he suggests.

“I will dump that drink all over your head, don’t test me.”

“Okay, okay,” Ethan laughs, gesturing to the seat across from him. “What’s on your mind?”

“You know that… that feeling you mentioned? When we were talking about multiple timelines and… what the fuck ever?”

“Yeah,” he says slowly, suspiciously.

Kira leans in and lowers her voice. “I’ve been having it, too. All year. I don’t know how to explain it. And you – your book said it was something to do with being connected to the Morphin’ Grid? What is that?”

Ethan’s face brightens, just like it always does when he gets to explain things. “Oh, you know the power rangers? Lightspeed Rescue, Wild Force, Samurai, Ninja Storm, those guys?”

Kira waves a hand impatiently. “Yeah, yeah, everyone knows about them. So what?”

“ _So_ they get their powers from this thing called the Morphin’ Grid. In theory, it stretches throughout time and space, and everyone is connected somehow.”

“So it’s like… God?”

Ethan pauses. “Uh, no. No, not quite. It’s a tangible thing. They tap into it to get their powers. Not everyone is _as_ connected as the power rangers, see? And some people – the bad guys – they’re connected to the _evil_ part of it. And that’s how you got those demons in Mariner Bay or whatever.”

“Okay, so it’s this superhero field thing. What does that have to do with us?” she demands.

“Well, in theory, _our_ Morphin’ Grid is the same Morphin’ Grid as the one in a different planet, or galaxy, or timeline. So maybe… maybe there’s an alternate universe where Kira Ford is a power ranger, and maybe that reality bleeds into this one through the connecting point of the Grid and that’s how you get… us.”

Kira stares at him. “And what’s us?”

Ethan shrugs helplessly. “Normal people who were maybe something special in another life?”

She frowns. “Then… what happened in _this_ life? Why aren’t we power rangers? Why aren’t we special?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “You hear of the Time Force rangers? They were reportedly from the future. Maybe somebody fucked around with time too much. People do that. I would do that, if I knew how to time travel.”

Kira snorts, leans back in her chair, mulls it over. “Have you ever considered maybe we’re just delusional?”

“Every day,” Ethan agrees. “But… I don’t know. I wouldn’t even talk to you outside of class if it wasn’t for this. Would you?”

She eyes him. “No,” she admits.

Ethan smiles at her. “Then maybe that’s a good enough reason.”

“Maybe it is.”

-:-

It doesn’t help much, the possibility of knowing that she was something special – something _better_ – in another life, when she’s just another struggling artist in this one. High school drags on, like quicksand around her feet, and all she can dream about is flying, even though she should know better.

Only birds and dinosaurs fly.

Kira takes her guitar to the zoo one day during winter break, hoping to finally finish her latest song after listening to the pterodactyl again. The zoo isn’t as crowded when it’s cold, so there aren’t a lot of people, and thankfully nobody she recognizes, until she stops by the T-Rex habitat and nearly bumps into someone from school.

Just her luck. “Sorry,” she mutters, ducking her head to hide her face as she sidesteps the person – he’s tall, he’s in red, and she thinks he plays soccer, but that’s all she knows or wants to know. The last thing she needs is Cassidy and Devin spreading rumors wondering why Kira Ford is at the zoo _willingly_.

“Hey,” he says, stopping her in her tracks. “Don’t I know you?”

“We go to school together,” Kira sighs, resigning herself for an awkward conversation.

“Sure, but… you’re friends with Ethan James, right?”

_That’s_ not a way she’s ever been described before. Kira turns to him, narrowing her eyes as she recognizes Conner McKnight. “Sort of. Why?”

He shifts his weight from leg to leg, then sticks out a hand for her to shake. Clearly, he doesn’t remember meeting her before. “I’m Conner. I was just – if you see Ethan, tell him he owes me a text, yeah?”

Kira stares at him, too befuddled to shake his hand. He’s _Conner McKnight_ , the best soccer player in Reefside High. “Wait, _you’re_ friends with Ethan? Aren’t you, like… a super jock?”

Conner cracks a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “Should I not be friends with Ethan?”

It does feel a little wrong to think of Conner McKnight and Ethan James being friends… but maybe not as wrong as it could be. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t think _I_ should be friends with Ethan.”

“It’s weird, right?” he grins. “But he’s pretty cool once you get past the five layers of geek.”

She laughs, despite herself. “Yeah, I guess he is. I’ll let him know. What are you doing here?”

Conner opens his mouth, then closes it. “I… I don’t know. I like to come… watch the dinosaurs sometimes. T-Rex is my favorite,” he adds with a nod towards the habitat where baby T-Rexes are hopping around.

Kira nods. “I was… just on my way to the pterodactyl exhibit, if you wanna join me. I have to work on a song but…”

“Sure,” he says with a shrug. “I got nothing better to do.”

She glances at him as they start walking towards the pterodactyls. “Don’t you have soccer practice or something?”

He sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Sometimes… I just feel like I should be doing something besides soccer. It’s like my whole life, you know? Ethan says it’s not healthy.”

“Oh, he would know,” Kira mutters.

Conner laughs. “I don’t know. Ever get the feeling you should be doing something else?”

Kira freezes. “Yeah,” she says slowly. “All the time.”

Conner looks at her with a half-smile and she can’t help but wonder how many other people there are in her school who understand – people she’s never even considered looking at, who might understand how she feels, too.

-:-

As it turns out, Hayley’s Cyberspace actually has great acoustics, and she talks it out with Hayley so she can come before it opens and practice on their stage. This has very little – or a lot – to do with Trent always being there in the mornings as well.

“Hey,” he greets, walking up with a glass of apple juice for her as she’s tuning her guitar. “You sound ready for the big time.”

Kira laughs, accepting the apple juice with a thankful smile. “I wish. Still gotta get through high school first.”

“No kidding,” Trent says, hopping up onto the stage to sit next to her. “You going to prom?”

“I was thinking about it,” Kira says, but he doesn’t ask her out or say anything afterwards, so she looks up at him with her brow furrowed. “Something on your mind?”

“Oh, uh,” Trent sighs, shaking his head. “No. I mean… not really. It’s just – I don’t know. I don’t know if you know my dad…”

“Anton Mercer, right?” Everyone in Reefside knows who Anton Mercer is, the city’s most famed resident and world-renowned scientist. “Is something wrong at home?”

“No, nothing – nothing like that,” he says quickly. “It’s not about me, it’s… it’s his research. He’s been messing around with dinosaur experiments and… I just think something’s off.”

“He does dinosaur breeding, doesn’t he?” Kira says, frowning. “He’s created, like, five new species for the dinosaur zoo. Is this like that?”

“No,” Trent says, mouth twisting. “It’s not like that. I don’t know what he’s doing, and he won’t tell me but… I don’t know. Do you think I should go to Dr. Oliver?”

“Maybe,” Kira says. “I can go with you, if you want.”

He smiles at her. “That would be nice. Do you want to go to prom with me?”

She chokes on her apple juice. “I – yes.”

Trent grins. “Cool.”

-:-

Dr. Oliver doesn’t seem too concerned until Trent mentions a green serum of dinosaur DNA and then he jumps. “We destroyed that serum. Why does he still have it?”

“I don’t know,” Trent says, spreading his hands helplessly. “I think he’s… planning on injecting into someone. Or something. A dinosaur, maybe?”

Dr. Oliver frowns. “No… that serum was for humans. To potentially help cure diseases. But the side-effects were too awful, so we cancelled the experiments. And I haven’t talked to him since our lab blew up.”

“Maybe you should talk to him again,” Kira prompts. Dr. Oliver looks at her, a little unsettled, maybe because of the conversation, but he looks at her like he’s seeing someone else in her place. She adds, “It can’t hurt, right?”

He nods. “I’ll talk to him after school today. Thanks for coming to me, Trent. Hey, are you guys going on the science museum field trip next week?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Trent says with a relieved smile.

“I would,” Kira mutters, but she waits until Dr. Oliver is out of hearing range to do it. Trent sends her a look and she smiles at him. “Museums are boring. We could ditch and go somewhere else instead.”

“And disappoint Dr. Oliver?”

Kira waves a hand. “He’s just a science teacher. He doesn’t actually care about us.”

Trent hums. “I don’t know about that,” he says, but he doesn’t press the subject, and neither does she.

-:-

She ends up going to the science museum, if only because Trent promises they can go out for ice cream afterwards, and he gets a discount at her favorite ice cream parlor because his father owns part of it or _something_. Either way, she finds herself at the flora and fauna exhibit, walking around life-size models of animals from the plains of America before it was colonized.

“Pretty cool how people just lived with all these animals without putting them in zoos, huh?” Devin asks from behind her – she doesn’t think he’s talking to her, because he’s always talking to Cassidy, but when she turns, he offers her a smile. “Sorry. Cassidy’s absent because she had to have her mani-pedi so I…”

“No, it’s fine,” Kira says, although the thought of Devin without Cassidy is strange. Some things are just constant. “Do you have a favorite exhibit?”

Devin’s eyes light up. “Yeah, have you seen the dinosaur exhibit? They have all these synthesized holograms of what dinosaurs looked like a hundred thousand years ago, it’s _wild_.”

“Weren’t they just bigger?”

“Bigger and scarier,” Devin says. “And they used to roam the Earth freely. Ever since humans came along… we’ve driven so many to extinction. And they’ve evolved to be smaller and some are even domesticated, except for, like, the _really_ big ones like the tyrannosaurs or the plesiosaurs. Did you know there’s a rumor of a plesiosaur haunting the Loch Ness Lake?”

“Yeah, but that’s just… a ghost story,” Kira says. Devin raises his eyebrows.

“Maybe. You don’t believe in ghost stories?”

Kira stares out across the simulated field, watching a fake orangutan offer an apple to a stegosaurus, thinking about the pterodactyl at the zoo – real, and wild, and longing to be free – and everything Ethan had told her about timelines diverging and the Morphin’ Grid lingering around people who are meant to be rangers, and the strangest of feelings that pulled her to people she would never have given the time of day ordinarily –

“Sometimes,” she admits softly. “Sometimes I do.”

-:-

The day Anton Mercer goes to jail for illegal scientific experiments on humans and on himself, Kira shows up at Trent’s empty manor with her guitar and her car keys.

“Hey,” she says, unsure of what else to add.

He doesn’t seem to expect her to say anything else. “Hey.”

Kira lifts her car keys. “Wanna get away?”

Trent manages a smile and follows her to her car. Inside, Conner and Ethan are sitting in the backseat, arguing over Wii sports or something stupid; Trent pauses in surprise.

“I didn’t know you were all friends.”

“We’re not,” Kira says at the same time as Conner and Ethan. They stop to glare at each other. “Okay, we kind of are,” she admits, opening the door to the driver’s seat. “But they’re the only people I could find who knew you and were willing to come with me.”

Trent laughs, self-deprecating, as he gets into the passenger’s seat. “I know I don’t exactly have a lot of friends.”

“Hey, you have us,” Ethan says, patting his shoulder from behind. “And Conner.”

Conner rolls his eyes. “Yeah, me and a couple of dweebs.” Kira gets the feeling he makes fun of them more because he thinks he has to than because he actually means it.

“With friends like these, who needs enemies?” Ethan says cheerfully.

Trent laughs, his face lightening for the first time since the trouble with his father started. “Where are we going?”

Kira smiles, plugging the key into the ignition. “The zoo.”

-:-

Near the triceratops pen, there’s a field that zoogoers use for picnics and letting the kids run around chasing holograms of dinosaurs. Kira claims a semi-secluded picnic table for them and Conner props a picnic basket up on it.

“Are we having a picnic?” Trent asks in confusion.

“Sort of,” Kira says with a shrug. “I figured we needed something to eat. I was actually gonna work on a song. I brought these two to keep you entertained.”

Conner and Ethan are currently engaged in a verbal fight over the pros and cons of different sorts of citrus fruits. Trent looks over at them and laughs, almost genuinely.

“I could just listen to you sing, honestly,” he tells her, smiling.

Kira grins and hops up on the picnic table. “Two types of entertainment, then. Thought it would take your mind off things.”

Trent sits down next to her, knees brushing, and leans over to kiss her. Conner and Ethan stop arguing to cheer and whistle, but Kira finds she doesn’t care about that. Trent tastes a little sad, but mostly he feels right, and ever since she’d started having dreams of missing something, being someone else, she hasn’t felt _right_ a lot.

“Thank you,” he tells her when they part, gaze sliding to Conner and Ethan briefly, then back to her with a smile. “What’s your song called?”

Kira sets her guitar on her lap and strums a few notes. Overhead, the pterodactyl flies again. She watches it, listening to its song as it circles the clouds, then looks back at Trent, and Conner, and Ethan. Thinks about how, a few months ago – a lifetime ago – she wouldn’t have even looked twice at them. Thinks about how much it feels right that they’re a part of her life, even though they have no reason to be. About how much she’s always missing someone that she’s not, that she can’t be, some invisible force pulling her to something she doesn’t understand.

But she understands enough for right now, enough for this lifetime, this timeline. In a different one, maybe she wouldn’t be friends with them. Or maybe they would be best friends. Or maybe – but the what-ifs don’t matter. She’s here for a reason.

“Thunder,” she decides, smiling at them, and begins to sing.


End file.
